This is one question I think many nations are struggling with. We're facing these evolving challenges, the conflict has changed, whereas in the past we used to have two states come to an agreement and we could put peacekeeping troops in between them and maintain their agreements.
With the evolving change in conflict we need to be cognizant that a military solution cannot be the one-stop solution. We need to make sure how diplomacy and development are going to be synchronized. This is one experience that I think Canada is very well poised to be able to offer to our allies. We have done this well.
What we're talking about here is after the fact. What we also need to now get better at is to start identifying where, in terms of some of the conflicts that we have seen, we could have possibly looked at dealing with them early on. We need to be looking at how do we identify some of the early indicators of say, for example, a political vacuum that might have been created in an area. What can we do early on to prevent the problem from getting even bigger?
What it comes back down to is our understanding of conflict and our understanding of certain regions of the world, understanding their social dynamic and how it's connected in with the political realm. The situation in Iraq is an example of this, where the ethnic sectarian violence created a political vacuum to allow a radical organization to take a foothold in a country and this is where we're at.
We need to be able to learn from those lessons and see what we can do in the early stages to prevent it from getting into a full-scale coalition effort to stop the threat.